1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to digital data processing and more particularly, but not by way of limitation, to systems and methods for interconnecting storage elements.
2. History of Related Art
Current supercomputing applications access and generate enormous quantities of data but are increasingly bandwidth limited when performing time-sensitive operations such as check pointing. Check pointing refers to the storage of a state of an entire system including, for example, memories, registers, register flags, access records, and cache contents, in such a fashion, that, should an operation fail in the future for some indeterminate reason, the operation may be restarted from a check point rather than restarting from the beginning. In general, the shorter the time required to fully store the state of the system, the quicker the operation may continue. Therefore, for a supercomputer cluster with hundreds of terabytes of data in memory, transfer times become critical.
The industry has developed a number of storage-interface technologies for storage elements such as disk drives; however, such technologies do not typically scale well in bandwidth. For example, Fibre Channel provides a dedicated storage interface with a network bandwidth of eight gigabits per second. Some storage elements have Fibre Channel interconnects so that they can be directly attached to a Fibre Channel switch. These interconnects may be bridged to increase bandwidth to the storage elements. However, Fibre Channel is limited in a number of lanes that can be bridged together. In addition, a single drive cannot generally be bridged.